We’re delighted to share our Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience creative anthology, published in collaboration with Riptide Journal (2024). You can read the digital version as a flipbook and via our website here. For more information about this initiative, please visit our blog post about the creative workshop we held in June 2024.
Local artist Molly Saunders has illustrated the themes of our Reading Bodies creative workshop in preparation for our forthcoming anthology with Riptide Journal. We’re pleased to share the series of images that have resulted from this collaboration below:
Molly took part in our creative workshop on 14 June 2024, producing live illustrations as the basis for the final images. You can find more details about her work here.
Artist Katharine Howell has illustrated the Reading Bodies collaborative process with Riptide Journal, in preparation for our forthcoming anthology on Burnout, Overload and Resilience. We’re delighted to share her illustration below:
You can find more information about the artist here.
By Dr Sally Flint, Project Partner for Reading Bodies and Creative Lead for We Are the Possible
‘We need / To leap / Right now / To the next stage / Of our evolution.’
Ben Okri
Burnout, Overload, and Resilience are words that in 2024 challenge analysis in literature, healthcare, and the media, especially alongside trending headlines which can often include crisis, doomsday, disaster, pollution, guilt, greenwashing, catastrophe, apocalypse, anxiety – all used to stress the global climate emergency, and the need to urgently change the way we consume and live. It’s like being in a crammed washing machine of words on a fast spin of environmental and societal problems. A recent article shows that neurologists are ‘alarmed’: ‘Everybody has a Breaking Point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains’ (C. P. Aldern, Guardian, 2024). While writing this, the latest pop-up on my PC reads – ‘but don’t confuse burnout with being busy!’
Therefore, it was intriguing and timely to deliver a creative writing workshop where we can create a collection of writing inspired by the Reading Bodies project using Burnout, Overload and Resilience as launch pads. To do this, as a writer, editor, and creative writing lecturer working at the interface of science, health, education, translation, and the arts, I adapted a workshop and editing methodology I established to ‘share insights across languages and academic disciplines.’ At the workshop, we considered different approaches to the theme of burnout, including workplace and caring pressures, strategies for dealing with stress, and connections with individual health.
I used a unique collaborative creative writing approach developed in 2017 when working with Met Office scientists on ways to communicate climate data to the public through the arts and science. On a NERC-funded yearlong project, Climate Stories, led by renowned climate scientist Professor Peter Stott, a group of climate scientists and art practitioners shared and experimented with narrative forms. Both willing and wary, we joined in creative writing, performance, printmaking, and music workshops. As the Creative Writing Lead, I encouraged writing that ‘showed’ working in the field of climate change, and the scientists’ stories that erupted were startling, from ice cracking in the Arctic to fleeing forest fires in South America. This storytelling approach helped scientists understand how using the senses to explain data – what they could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell – brought to life what it’s really like on the frontline of climate change.
Then, as the Covid crisis spread and the world stalled, Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon (Director, We Are the Possible, University of Exeter), had an inspired vision to bring together science, health, education, translation, and the arts to communicate to broad audiences how human health relies on maintaining, restoring and protecting planetary health and ecosystems. Following a unique creative and editorial process, a collection of poems was published, and with the support of the Met Office UK, we delivered One Chance Left – 12 poems co-created by climate scientists and health professionals at an event in the first-ever Science Pavilion at the COP26 climate conference (Glasgow 2021). The poems, underpinned by science and health research, received such a positive reaction that by 2022 our team had grown to include not only scientists and health professionals, but educators, translators, youth leaders, and artists in the UK and Egypt, using a now proven creative collaborative way of working which resulted in We Still Have a Chance – 12 stories for 12 days of COP27 (Egypt 2022) which reached over 28 million people and counting.
Thank you so much to our participants and speakers for joining our Creative Writing workshop on “Burnout, Overload, and Resilience,” held at the University of Exeter on June 14, 2024. The event was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies), Dr. Sally Flint (Lecturer in Creative Writing), and Dr. Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher) and we were thrilled to welcome such a diverse group to the event – which included teachers, entrepreneurs, NHS practitioners, yoga teachers, a live illustrator, academics, and postgraduate students.
By Dr Daniele Carrieri, Lecturer in Public Health, University of Exeter, and Project Partner for Reading Bodies
In preparation for our creative workshop on burnout and resilience, Dr Daniele Carrieri explores research perspectives on related workplace issues. For more information about this research theme, please visit our Resources page.
Introduction
I have come across, but never investigated, the term ‘quiet quitting’. This creative writing workshop on burnout, overload and resilience offers an excellent opportunity to start filling this gap in my research on mental ill-health and wellbeing in a high-stress work context: healthcare.[1] Quiet quitting is newer and possibly less known than ‘burnout’, ‘stress’ or’ resilience’. It also has some evocative potential – which I hope will inspire creating thinking and writing. I believe there is a poetic flare in ‘quiet quitting’ (perhaps also due to its alliteration?), as well as echoes of cultural references such as Thoreau’s ‘quiet desperation’ (Thoreau, ed. 2006), or, more recently, the introversion highlighted by Cain in her book ‘Quiet’ (Cain, 2013).
Award-winning creator of graphic novels and former UK Comics Laureate 2019-21, Hannah Berry, has collaborated with Reading Bodies to illustrate our research theme of Burnout, Overload and Resilience.
We are looking forward to the third in our series of project workshops for Reading Bodies, hosted by the University of Exeter on 14 June 2024. This creative writing workshop on the theme of Burnout, Overload and Resilience, will be introduced by researchers in Languages, Public Health and Psychology, and led by Dr Sally Flint, a specialist in Creative Writing. A reminder of practical information and what to bring can be found in our flyer below. We invite submissions of writing and illustrations for publication in Riptide Journal.
Thanks to all our wonderful speakers from the Universities of Belfast, Boston (USA), Cambridge, Exeter, Kent, London and Sheffield, for our second international Reading Bodies workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. The workshop was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies) and Dr Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher). Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University) delivered a brilliant keynote on Health, Disease, and Society in the Early Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The programme included specialists in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German, and a hybrid Roundtable on interdisciplinary approaches to Reading Bodies in Literatures and Cultures.
We’re looking forward to our second international workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. All are welcome to attend – please reserve your place here.
Highlights include speakers across 4 languages, a keynote by Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University), an interdisciplinary Reading Bodies Roundtable, and a Stage Rehearsal of Multilingual Medical Humanities (with Ants!). There will also be a short talk about Bibliotherapy by Exeter City of Literature. For more information about the programme, please visit our events page.